Pursuing Public Space in a Time of Private Interest

A model of the Bernie Grant Arts Center in London, a space that is a big aluminum-clad shed.Credit
Photographs by Ruby Washington/The New York Times

“David Adjaye: Making Public Buildings,” an exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, is the kind of measured, well-meaning endeavor that provokes reflection but yields few profound insights.

Public space is always a cause worth embracing in an era when the government continues to turn large swaths of the public realm over to private interests. And it has particular resonance in Harlem, where accelerating gentrification threatens to erode the fabric of neighborhoods even as it holds out the hope of economic revival.

Although Mr. Adjaye, a 40-year-old British architect who was born in Tanzania, made his name by creating spare, geometric houses for art-world clients, he obviously has a keen understanding of how architecture can serve as a community’s social glue. His best designs are enlivened by a sensitivity for the tactile qualities — the textures of materials, the play of light — that engage you physically and mentally and bring architecture to life.

But the show, which includes drawings, models and videos of 10 of Mr. Adjaye’s buildings, suffers from an effort to extract meaning where there is none. He repeatedly makes strained references to indigenous African architecture, and many of the projects lack the kind of accompanying text that could make them more accessible to a general audience: information about their physical setting, for example, or the historical background of the institutions they house.

Of the 10 projects on view here, the most architecturally convincing is the Stephen Lawrence Center in Deptford, London, an education center for the local working-class community that is to open this fall. Situated between a busy commercial strip and a canal (although the models on view don’t make this context clear), it was founded in response to the 1993 racially motivated killing of a Jamaican student who had aspirations of becoming an architect. (The crime is mentioned only in the exhibition catalog.)

Mr. Adjaye’s design is conceived as two distinct volumes. A small triangular building that will house the studios is lifted off the ground on slender columns, allowing room for a public garden. A narrow bridge joins the triangular form to a larger trapezoidal structure for offices and computer rooms.

The sharp forms vaguely invoke the bold geometries of early Brutalism, or even Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s utopian designs from the late 18th century. But the sharpness is softened by the way that Mr. Adjaye dissolves the boundaries between inside and out. For example, a rooftop terrace along three sides of the larger structure invites visitors to watch life flowing by on the canal and in the gardens.

That effect is reinforced by the porous quality of the buildings’ surfaces. Both buildings are clad in aluminum-mesh panels that will allow passers-by to glimpse the shadowy silhouettes of people inside. The studio building is also punctured by big circular windows. The goal is both a strong architectural presence and a sense of immersion in the social life of the community, a balance that is not easy to pull off.

Mr. Adjaye’s dedication to this is evident in all of his best work. The Bernie Grant Arts Center in the Tottenham district of London, for example, a big performing arts space named for one of Britain’s first black members of Parliament and scheduled for completion this fall, is an enormous aluminum-clad shed on the site of a former public baths. Two smaller structures nearby — a low, narrow rectangle that houses subsidized work spaces for young artists and a small office and classroom building — frame a hierarchy of formal and informal public plazas.

With its glossy metal surface, the gently tapered form of the performing arts building conjures the hollow shell of a gigantic beetle. A roof projects out at one end to form a canopy over an informal outdoor lobby, and the pattern is repeated inside in a lush dark timber from Ghana. Framed by these simple forms, the outdoor plazas have the haunting emptiness of a de Chirico painting.

Similarly, the taut, compact form of Mr. Adjaye’s Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver is slightly distorted to give it a stronger presence in the civic landscape. The main facade is set at a slight angle so that it is visible as you approach from downtown; the galleries are divided into three separate vertical stacks with circulation weaving up between them to a semipublic rooftop restaurant and garden.

But too many of the other works are straightforward and conventional. The design for his Fairfield Road housing in London is a simple block that is split in two — one clad in brass, the other in bronze — and twisted on the site to create oblique views down the street. The gap between the two forms breaks down the scale of the building, but doesn’t accomplish much else. The structure rests on a two-story base that adds to its heavy appearance. A design for Wakefield Market Hall in Yorkshire, with a big outdoor canopy supported by wood columns, is relatively unimaginative.

The main weakness of the show, however, arises when Mr. Adjaye struggles to link his designs to vernacular architecture in developing countries that he has visited, as if he were worried that the work wouldn’t stand on its own. A captivating five-minute video is packed with everything from images of classical Modernism, like Lucio Costa and Oscar Neimeyer’s 1936 Ministry of Education and Health Building in Rio de Janeiro, to the patchwork of colorful corrugated metal sheds found in Capetown’s slums and a Dogon settlement in Mali, with its network of labyrinthine alleyways. But this is a travelogue, not serious architectural research. And it’s sometimes hard to fathom what light it sheds on Mr. Adjaye’s public projects.

The bare, crooked tree trunks that are used to support traditional Malinese sunshades have obviously influenced the big canopy of the Wakefield Market Hall, but a photograph of the gorgeous patterned surface of a straw mat from Rwanda only makes the bowed roof of Mr. Adjaye’s Bernie Grant Arts Center seem static by comparison. His aesthetic is still far closer in spirit to that of David Chipperfield, the London architect whose reputation rests on designing reassuringly clean minimalist structures for risk-averse clients. It was in Mr. Chipperfield’s office that Mr. Adjaye cut his teeth before opening his own practice in 1994.

Mr. Adjaye’s cautious approach is in sharp contrast to the flashy architectural one-liners favored by many architects of his generation. More than most, he seems painfully attuned to the damage that architecture can do. While his unusual level of sensitivity makes his future seem promising, we await the imaginative turn that will make his work wholly his.

The show is up through Oct. 28 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, 144 West 125th Street, (212) 864-4500.

A version of this review appears in print on , on page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: Pursuing Public Space in a Time of Private Interest. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe